The World's Most Haunted Hospitals: True-Life Paranormal Encounters in Asylums, Hospitals, and Institutions

By Richard Estep

A paramedic and paranormal investigator takes readers on a terrifying tour of haunted hospitals, asylums, and medical facilities across the globe.

Hospitals are the nexus point between life and death, the place into which people enter this world, but also exit it. When we consider what has taken place behind the closed doors of hospitals since the inception of the medical profession, it should come as no surprise to discover that so many of them are haunted. In The World's Most Haunted Hospitals, paramedic and paranormal investigator Richard Estep recounts some of the most fascinating—and chilling—stories of hospital hauntings from across the globe, including:

• The apparitions at an old Utah hospital, now a nursing home, whose appearances are said to predict a patient's death.
   
• The Italian island referred to by locals as "the gateway to Hell," where the spirits of thousands of plague victims prowl the streets.
   
• The terrifying phenomena that keep visitors away from an abandoned airbase hospital in the Philippines.
   

The ghostly nurse who has haunted the corridors of a London hospital for generations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781632659729

Richard Estep

Richard Estep is the author of more than twenty books, including Visible Ink Press’ Serial Killers: The Minds, Methods, and Mayhem of History's Most Notorious Murderers as well as The Horrors of Fox Hollow Farm and Haunted Healthcare. He is a regular columnist for Haunted Magazine and he appears regularly on TV shows such as Haunted Hospitals. He has had a lifelong fascination for ghosts and true crime. British by birth, Richard now makes his home in Colorado a few miles north of Denver, where he serves as a paramedic and lives with his wife and a menagerie of adopted animals.

Book preview

The World’s Most Haunted Hospitals

True-Life Paranormal Encounters in Asylums, Hospitals, and Institutions

The World’s Most Haunted Hospitals

Richard Estep

Copyright © 2016 by Richard Estep

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

THE WORLD’S MOST HAUNTED HOSPITALS

TYPESET BY KRISTIN GOBLE

Printed in the U.S.A.

Front cover images: Surgery room photo by kre_geg/iStock; Hospital ruins photo by Sean Pavone/iStock; Wheelchair photo by stuart renneberg/iStock; Back cover image by Patrick Foto/shutterstock

To order this title, please call toll-free 1-800-CAREER-1 (NJ and Canada: 201-848-0310) to order using VISA or MasterCard, or for further information on books from Career Press.

The Career Press, Inc.

12 Parish Drive

Wayne, NJ 07470

www.careerpress.com

www.newpagebooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Estep, Richard, 1973-

Title: The world’s most haunted hospitals : true-life paranormal encounters

in asylums, hospitals, and institutions / by Richard Estep.

Description: Wayne : Career Press, Inc., 2016. | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015037787| ISBN 9781632650269 | ISBN 9781632659729 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Haunted hospitals. | Asylums--Miscellanea.

Classification: LCC BF1474.4 .E88 2016 | DDC 133.1/22--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037787

This book is dedicated to those who do not accept themselves as being in a dead end, but are able to change their path regardless of age, experience, and background. These are the people who challenge themselves, renew, relearn, and take the rest of us into new and wonderful places with them. The author should recognize himself as one of these exceptional people.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If you are thinking that the dedication of this book was a little self-important, particularly the phrase the author should recognize himself as one of these exceptional people, you should thank Ade Barwick. Ade won my charity auction by donating a significant amount of money to The Teenage Cancer Trust (www.teenagecancertrust.org) in exchange for writing the dedication himself (and embarrassing the author into the bargain!).

This book would not have been possible without the time, passion, and assistance of the many individuals who contributed to its writing, generously sharing their stories of haunted healthcare facilities from around the world. All credit goes to them, and any errors made are the responsibility of the author.

• Dr. Alison Leary

• Annie Lindsay at the National Health Service

• Kelvin Tan of 360 Snapshots and Amber Moose, photographers extraordinaire, and the kind uploaders to Wikimedia Commons, for brightening up the book

• Hung of www.Hungzai.com for graciously sharing stories of Changi

• Marcus Lindsey and Clare Benavides of Paranormal EXP

• Jason and Angela Arnold of Contact Paranormal

• Darren from Ghost Research International

• Paranormal investigator Joe Mendoza

• Rob Calzada and Golden Crescent Paranormal

• The Old Yoakum Hospital Group

• Media maestro Noel Boyd and the crew from Ghost Files Singapore

• Author Robin Saikia

• Hazel Bishop and the West Houston Paranormal Society

• Russell Rush and his Haunted Tour team

• Author Marty Young

• Susan Wallner of Final Dimension Paranormal

• Matthew Didier and John Savoie at PsiCan

• Jim Harry the Horse Dale

• Urban explorers Robert Joe and Brian J. Cano

• Mike Sculley

• Andy Laird of the Rhode Island Paranormal Research Society

• Laura Giuliano from the Para-Boston Team

• Bloggers Shuko K. Tamao (Reversed View of Massachusetts) and J.W. Ocker (Odd Things I’ve Seen)

• Kimm and Cami Andersen, Misty Grimstead, and Dusty Kingston of Asylum 49

• Barry Fitzgerald of Ghost Hunters International

• Marcelle Hanauer and Chuck Thornton of St. Albans

• Chris Balassone of Tri-State Paranormal

• Michael Cardinuto of L.I.P.I.

• Zak Bagans, Nick Groff, and Aaron Goodwin

• Author George Dudding

• Laura Estep, Jason and Linda Fellon, Sean Rice, Mike and Caren Kraft, Charlie Stiffler, Catlyn Keenan, Kira and Seth Woodmansee, and the investigators from BCPRS

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

1 Asylum 49

2 RAF Hospital Nocton Hall

3 The Clark Air Base Hospital

4 The Spencer State Hospital

5 The Aradale Mental Hospital

6 The Linda Vista Community Hospital

7 St. Thomas’s Hospital

8 Poveglia Island

9 The Rolling Hills Asylum

10 University College Hospital

11 The Yorktown Memorial Hospital

12 The Danvers State Insane Asylum

13 Grace Hospital

14 Metropolitan State Hospital

15 The Old Changi Hospital

16 The Old Yoakum Memorial Hospital

17 St. Albans Sanatorium

Notes

Index

About the Author

FOREWORD

Some people may ask the question: Why would an old hospital be haunted? Well, I ask: Why wouldn’t it be? As someone who has been in the medical field for more than 20 years, which includes being a Licensed Practical Nurse working on a Med/Surg floor and my current position working as a paramedic in the field, I can tell you that it makes a lot of sense. Look at all the trauma that comes into the hospitals, for instance, the sudden deaths and the near-death experiences (NDEs). That’s not even including the specialty hospitals such as the psychiatric hospitals and tuberculosis hospitals. There are so many old hospitals around this country that have been deemed haunted; for instance, Old South Pittsburg Hospital, Rolling Hills Asylum, St. Albans (my favorite), and that is just to name a very few.

There is a lot of energy that is left over from when these hospitals were active, where people have passed away. Energy never dissipates, so it is possible that the energy is still within the walls and is released at certain times. You can also think of it as souls who feel that they are stuck in these buildings and don’t know how to move on. No matter which side you lean toward, you have to admit hospitals are good places to start looking for paranormal activity. Some of the hospitals around the world are conducting a type of paranormal research. These hospitals are researching NDEs by putting certain words up near the ceiling, in places where nobody on the floor can see them. If they have a patient that codes (dies) and comes back, the patient is asked whether they experienced an NDE. You have to admit that is pretty cool for modern medical science to be looking into the paranormal!

There are also a number of medical conditions that can explain certain paranormal experiences. For instance, there are people who will smell something specific and believe that it is a loved one letting them know that they are there. It has actually been proven that if it is just one single person in a group that smells it then they are probably having a micro-seizure in the olfactory part of the brain, which is in charge of processing smells. Think about those patients who claim that they see something or someone, only for the nurse to just dismiss it due to pre-existing medical conditions, which may be inducing hallucinations. But what if it wasn’t a hallucination; what if there was genuinely something there that the nurse simply couldn’t see?

The specialty hospitals, such as psychiatric wards and tuberculosis hospitals, have an even greater chance of being haunted than a regular hospital does. The conditions in psychiatric hospitals that were operating years and years ago were inhumane, to say the least. Patients would be locked in small rooms and sometimes even chained to the wall. Then the doctors would perform horrible procedures, such as lobotomies. When they would perform this procedure the doctor would usually take a very long thin metal rod and put it up the patient’s nose and continually ram it around. That would destroy the frontal lobe of the brain and most of the time make the patient a zombie, if it didn’t kill them. Then they started using electricity to try to cure these poor people, shocking patients over and over repeatedly, at incrementally higher doses each time. Now that these hospitals are abandoned, all of that trauma and energy of the patients who were experimented on (many of whom died there) remains. This can make it a little more dangerous since the spirits that may still be there were deranged in life, and are probably even worse in death. They could be wandering the halls when suddenly new people show up with all kinds of weird objects, walking around with things in their hands that may remind them of those experiments.

The tuberculosis hospitals are very similar. The difference is that these patients were usually sane, but had a much higher death rate. In these hospitals, the doctors also conducted experiments such as deflating lungs, or even taking parts of the lung out. Deaths occurred on a daily basis in tuberculosis sanatoriums and hospitals. The trauma and multiple deaths that took place on those properties could be the reasons why these facilities undergo so much paranormal activity.

Hospitals are huge places and are easy to get lost in, even when the facility is still in operation. Now, imagine those big hospitals being dark and completely empty. That alone will put people in an uncomfortable position, and that is when the mind starts to play tricks. Every noise seems to be close to you, and does not seem to be a normal noise for the building that you are in—or so you think. Once it gets dark, you will start seeing shadows or light play; either way, you become overwhelmed and very spooked, hearing and seeing things that you wouldn’t normally notice. For paranormal investigators, those are the things that we live for, but for others, this is often simply too much to handle.

Chris Balassone, EMT-Paramedic,

director, Tri-City Paranormal,

lecturer and paranormal investigator,

Colonial Heights, Virginia

INTRODUCTION

When we consider what has taken place behind the closed doors of hospitals since the inception of the medical profession, it should come as no surprise to discover that so many of them turn out to be haunted. The typical hospital happens to be a microcosm of the very best and worst extremes of the human experience, providing the perfect stage for the high drama, which tends to occur in even the most stable life at some point in time.

Love. Hate. Fear. Anger. Excitement. Relief. Heartbreak. Depression. Anxiety. All of these, and so many more emotions, are played out against the backdrop of a house of healing. Human beings enter the world in the labor and delivery departments, often kicking and screaming, born in a welter of blood, pain, and blinding light, delivered into the reassuringly stable hands of doctors and nurses.

Others are rushed there by paramedics such as myself, their bodies broken and bleeding; some are shot, stabbed, or otherwise brutalized by the events of a largely uncaring world. My colleagues and I do our best to keep them alive and stabilized as best we can while the lights flash and sirens wail, before entrusting their care to the highly skilled trauma teams who will do their best to save yet another human life.

And finally, hospitals are where so many breathe their last breath. Surrounded by family, friends, and caregivers, a hospital bed is often the place in which the final scenes of a human life are played out, the last lines of that particular book are written, before the cover is closed and the person moves on to whatever it is that comes next.

Life, death, and the entire spectrum of human experience that lies in between those two end points…just another day in the life of a hospital facility.

For the doctors, nurses, therapists, and technicians who have made it their life’s work to ease the pain and suffering of their fellow human beings, medicine is a calling—something that they feel drawn to. Medicine is not simply a job or a career choice. It is a vocation. The first pair of hands that bring a new life into this world typically belong to a physician; it is often also the hands of a physician that are the last to be laid upon a dying body when that human being leaves this world at the end of their lifetime.

I have made my living as a paramedic and as a clinical educator for many years. It’s a profession that I am extremely honored to be a part of, and I feel truly fortunate to do what I do. But my other great passion has always been paranormal investigation. Stories of ghosts and haunted houses have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. As a small boy, I would look forward to visiting my grandparents’ house—haunted by several ghosts, including the phantom of an old lady renowned for tucking up children tightly in their beds after the lights went out—with an equal mixture of exhilaration and dread.

Things haven’t changed much since then. All these years later, whenever I’m zipping up my equipment packs before heading out to spend the night in some reputedly haunted place, I feel that same level of excitement. Much of the fear has gone, but not all of it. Some of the most haunted buildings that I have ever been privileged to set foot in have been hospitals, and paradoxically, some of the best-kept secret ghost stories are from the same kinds of places. After all, what sensible healthcare manager wants to publicize the possibility that their place of healing could be haunted? There is a very reasonable concern about upsetting the patients, or their families, in the very environment where they should feel most relaxed and restful.

But for most of those medical professionals who believe in such things as the paranormal (many doctors simply refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of ghosts being real), it is easiest to adopt a simple that’s just the way it is attitude, and go on about their business of caring for patients, taking the ghostly goings-on in their stride.

A great example of this involves a local hospital that I once used to transport patients to and from. In all the years that I went in and out of that facility, I never heard the slightest rumor of a ghost story. Not even a hint. When the hospital subsequently closed down, having moved on to a brand new campus elsewhere, I happened to be having dinner with an old friend who once served there as a nurse.

Of course, she said matter-of-factly, spearing another forkful of pasta. You know about the doors up on the second floor, right?

I shook my head, suddenly riveted.

Oh, they used to open and close themselves all the time on the night shifts. We just used to tell whoever or whatever it was to knock it off once it got to be too annoying, and they always did.

The easy answer would be that it was simply a mechanical problem, of course, but she assured me that the maintenance staff had checked them over thoroughly and found nothing wrong. She and her fellow nurses had simply come to accept that the resident ghost was up to its tricks again.

Keep calm and carry on, as the saying goes—and if any phrase typifies the profession of nursing, that would be the one. For its practitioners, a haunted hospital is simply business as usual.

Many people believe that ghosts tend to arise in places where death has taken place, and there is much evidence to support that particular contention. But it is also fair to say that some spirits return to places in which they were emotionally invested during their lifetime, especially those places in which they experienced either great happiness or sadness. Consider the numerous cases of ghostly nurses and doctors who are still making their rounds, sometimes many decades (in some instances, even centuries) after passing away; or the patients who seem to linger on after their deaths, walking the halls and rooms of the hospitals in which they stayed.

I recently had the good fortune to investigate an abandoned former hospital in Utah, where (among many other ghosts) I learned that one of the rooms was said to be haunted by the ghost of a former patient. This tragic soul suffered from the cruel and debilitating disease known as Alzheimer’s, a malady that strips away the sufferer’s dignity and personality in the worst way imaginable. According to the owners of the former hospital (now converted into a Halloween haunted house), the spirit of this kindly old man returns with some frequency to the room in which he spent many of his final days upon this Earth, interacting with staff and paranormal investigators alike on occasion. Those who have encountered this ghost say that it appears to be prone to the sudden and unpredictable emotional swings that characterized his behavior in life; if true, what might that say about the survival of consciousness after death? Is it possible that we might take some of our disease processes with us? Most psychic mediums state emphatically that this is not the case, but who can truly say for sure until we each find out the answer for ourselves?

Wandering the long-abandoned hallways and patient care rooms of a massive sanatorium just last week, I was struck by the sense of sheer melancholy that pervaded every single brick of the place. Tens of thousands of people had died in that particular hospital over the years when it served as a fortress on the front lines of America’s war against tuberculosis. So great was the rate of patient loss that a body chute was used to transport the bodies of the newly deceased in a discreet manner, affording them a little additional dignity in death and at the same time helping to reduce the drop in morale experienced by those remaining patients who would otherwise be spectators to a seemingly endless parade of body bags passing them by.

With death and suffering having taken place on such a monumental scale, it is no wonder that some trace, some essence of it has remained throughout the years, perhaps imprinted on the very structure of the hospital itself. No wonder then, that such a place should be the scene of phantom footsteps, disembodied voices, mysterious shadow figures, and a host of other paranormal phenomena, all reported by scores of reliable witnesses.

Nor is it just the hospital facilities that cater to diseases and injuries of the body that are prone to being haunted—we must also take into account those that deal primarily with the human brain and mind. And so it is that mental health care institutions (once referred to in a crueler turn of phrases as madhouses, or the only slightly more palatable term asylums) also have their ghosts. Patients were often locked up in such places for years on end, if not decades in some cases, sometimes in conditions that bordered upon the inhumane. Procedures such as frontal lobotomies performed with ice picks and hammers were commonplace, inducing some of the most horrific symptoms and side effects in the misguided quest to restore sanity to those judged insane.

Hauntings of mental institutions tend to be rather disturbing in nature, perhaps a reflection of the torment endured by the residents of such facilities. Some poor souls spent the majority of their lives incarcerated, sometimes on the flimsiest of pretexts—if a husband wanted an easy divorce, it was not beyond the realms of possibility to have his wife declared insane, having her carted off quickly and conveniently to the closest institution, perhaps never to see the freedom of the outside world ever again.

Such misery abides, leaving behind a permanent mark or stain upon its environment, perhaps to be experienced again and again by those with suitable abilities and temperament, when the conditions are right for them to do so.

This book does not attempt to be an exhaustive catalogue of every single haunted hospital in the world. Determining precisely